I was sure that I would at least be seeing crack whores having sex in the hallways when I got out of the elevator.

At the very least, I wanted to hear loud screaming, maybe even a gunshot in the room next door in the middle of the night.

I stayed at the dirtiest, cheapest hotel in NYC last night because I wanted to be right by the Nasdaq when I woke up. I had videos to do at 7:30am with the Yahoo team (Stacy Curtin, Aaron Task, and Henry Blodget) and I knew I would need to wake up at 4:30 to prepare or they would crucify me with questions I couldn’t answer and I’d feel humiliated and embarrassed. I stayed at the “St. James Hotel” [Note to St. James legal team: all blog mentions are positive publicity] which I remembered from my 3am/HBO days. I knew what went on there. But…

Nothing.

And at 4:30 in the morning when I woke up and went downstairs for coffee there was just the manager downstairs watching the Royal Wedding. Whatever happened to real shitbag hotels in this fine city? The Royal Wedding? I watched it for five minutes with the guy. The only thing that I got out of it was that Prince William and his new bride were going to be spending the night at Buckingham Palace. Why can’t anyone on the news just say, “does that mean they will probably be having sex at Buckingham Palace? Does anyone know when the last time that happened was?” Piers Morgan, where are you when we need you at moments like this?

(Piers Morgan getting kissed by one of my ex-girlfriends)

7:30 I went to do my videos with Aaron Task and Henry Blodget. The thing is, I realized I had been a bit misleading. One of the topics was going to be “10 Reasons You Need to Quit Your Job Right now.” But when I looked at the blog post I had already done on the topic I realized that I said 90% of people “Should” quit their jobs and I gave 10 reasons for recognizing if now is the right time for you to leave. But that’s a little different than saying, you have to quit right now.

But the reality is, most people need to begin their exit strategyright now.

So here’s the 10 reasons you need to quit your job right now. And below that I have the methods for doing it.

1) Safety. We used to think you get a corporate job, you rise up, you get promoted, maybe you move horizontally to another division or a similar company, you get promoted again, and eventually you retire with enough savings in your IRA. That’s all gone. That myth disappeared in 2008. It really never existed but now we know it’s a myth. Corporate CEOs kept their billion dollar salaries and laid off about 20 million people and sent the jobs to China. Fine, don’t complain or blame other people. But your job is not safe.

2) Home. Everyone thinks they need a safe job so they can save up to buy a home and also qualify for a mortgage. Mortgage lenders at the banks like people who are like them – other people locked in cubicle prison. Well now you don’t need to worry about that. Here’s why you should never own a home in the first place. Save yourself the stress.

3) College. Everyone thinks they need to save up to send their kids to college. Depending on how many kids you have and where you want them to go to college it could cost millions. Well now we know you don’t need to send your kid to college. So you don’t need to stress about that money anymore.

4) Their boss. Most people don’t like their boss. Its like any relationship. Most of the time you get into a relationship for the wrong reasons. Eventually you’re unhappy. And if you don’t get out, you become miserable and scarred for life.

5) Their coworkers. See above.

6) Fear. We have such a high unemployment rate, people are afraid if they leave the job they are miserable at, they won’t be able to get a job. This is true if you just walk into your boss’s office and pee on his desk and get fired. But its not true if you prepare well. More on that in a bit.

7) The Work. Most people don’t like the work they do. They spend 4 years going to college, another few years in graduate school, and then they think they have to use that law degree, business degree, architecture degree and then guess what? They hate it. But they don’t want to admit it. They feel guilty. They are in debt. No problem. Read on.

8) Bad things happen. All the stuff I mention in the post “10 Reasons You Need to Quit Your Job” start to happen. And it gets worse and worse. You don’t want to look back at your life and say, “man, those were the worst 45 years of my life.” That wouldn’t feel good.

9) The economy is about to boom. I don’t care if you believe this or not. Stop reading the newspaper so much. The newspapers are trying to scare you. Bernanke just printed up a trillion dollars and airlifted it onto the US economy. Who is going to scoop that up. You in your cubicle? Think again.

10) Your job has clamped your creativity. You do the same thing every day. You want to be jolted, refreshed, rejuvenated.

Note: some people love their jobs. This is not for them but the 90% who don’t.

So: Henry and Aaron asked a good question: you still need to support yourself, you still need to support your family, you can’t just walk into your boss’s office and quit.

Good point. You need to prepare. Its like training for the Olympics if you feel now is the time to move on from your job. You need to be physically ready, emotionally (don’t quit your job and get divorced on the same day for instance), mentally (get your idea muscle in shape) and spirituall all ready.

The posts that will help you quit your job. To quit, at least follow the ideas in the first post:

In the above link, it’s not about starting a business. It’s about finding what your frontier is, how to explore it, how to test the waters and move beyond it. I’m not saying I can do this. I’ve hit my boundary so many times and bounced off that I have six broken noses to show for it.

Some notes on this post:

Note #1: I get a lot of criticisms from anonymous people in the Yahoo message boards. Claudia begs me, “Don’t look at the message boards unless you talk to me first.” Because she knows I’m an addict. I tell her ‘ok’ but I know I’m going to look. Because that’s what addicts do.

Note #2: Sometimes people criticize the “list” format in these posts. “10 reasons” for this. “10 reasons” for that. About 20% of my posts are lists. Not so much. Read “The Power of Hypnosis” or “The Tooth” for two recent non-list posts. And Charlton Heston clearly didn’t mind lists when he came down from Mt. Sinai with “The 10 Commandments”, the very first blog post. 3500 years later and still getting clicks.

(the first blogger)

I don’t mind when people critique me when they’ve lost, quit, or have been fired from as many jobs as I have. Or lost a home. Tried to raise two kids with almost nothing. Been as desperately unhappy as sometimes I’ve been. This doesn’t qualify me for anything, of course. Maybe it disqualifies me. Who cares? A lot of people have had much worse than me. And I’ve been very blessed as well.

Sometimes you can build back up. And sometimes you just think, “How the hell did this happen to me again”. You can criticize me on Yahoo message boards. You can critique lists if you think you have some better way of helping people. My goal in these posts is to help people maybe think for a split second they can reduce some stress in their lives, they don’t have to go through what I went through, they can throw themselves into experience and still come back alive, and at the end of the day, they can use some of these ideas to live a better and more fulfilling life. I’ve had that experience and I like to write about it.

Later tonight I’m going to give my two daughters, nine and twelve years old, two choices and ONLY two choices. Either they watch “Star Wars” with me or they watch “Schindler’s List”. And if they don’t like either choice then maybe I’ll just sit by the TV with some ice cream and watch all by myself.

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16653115 Responseshttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.elephantjournal.com%2F2011%2F05%2F10-reasons-you-need-to-quit-your-job-right-now-2%2F10+More+Reasons+You+Need+to+Quit+Your+Job+Right+Now%212011-05-13+22%3A31%3A43elephantjournal.comhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.elephantjournal.com%2F%3Fp%3D166531 to “10 More Reasons You Need to Quit Your Job Right Now!”

James, I could not agree more! There is so much fear holding us back from doing what we really want to do — most of us are so hidden inside boxes that we can't even begin to contemplate our potential. The system is built to make us feel small, but we are not. Perhaps we are infinite. Perhaps I am spam for the infinite (sorry, i thought the spam for used trucks was funny).

Really… you find "crack whores" as you call them having sex in hallways and gunshots amusing? These are real people suffering and living under dangerous conditions and you choose that as entertainment? Are you so far removed from your own humanity you objectify and de-humanize one set of people as a trite lead in to a story about the good people you're trying to help? Give your head and your heart a shake. I expect more from the Elephant. But maybe I shouldn't. This is disgusting.

Hi Jodie: Shame on the author, you mean. "You" as in elephant is our writers, and our writers are our readers, and we do allow (as in a democracy) a wide range of viewpoints, even those we might disagree with. Personally, I'm with you on this one, and this author no longer writers for elephant (by his own choice).

Elephant still chooses what to print and what not to print. Unless Elephant has become a free for all where anyone can write anything at all, I assume it is curated in some way by the editors. Thus, Elephant, you have to accept some responsibility for what is written here. If it were just a "community forum" where anyone could write anything, how could you say that it is "dedicated to the mindful life." There is some decision process that decides what contributes to the vision of elephant and what does not. Abdicating responsibility for this makes me sad. Either you are an online community publishing content relevant to the mindful life, or you are just editors of whomever wants to take a platform for anything. If the KKK wrote a piece about committing mindful hate crimes would you publish that and just throw up your arms "hey! It's not us, it is the COMMUNITY!" ??

I don't understand the intro about "crack whores" and wanting to hear a gunshot. I can't believe the profound and unexamined privilidge in this. As a person who works with people who live in profoundly dangerous and violent places, your complaint that you didn't get to see "Crack whores" (who are people, BTW. People's mom's and daughters and friends and sisters) or get a nice Disney "brush with danger" is pretty disgusting. And, your advice? Nice for some people who are risk tolerant and have someone to fall back on if their plans fail utterly. Lastly, people who go to college, still, on average do much better in the long term than those who do not. For the average person, going to college is a way to secure better income. Thanks for this look into the world of the profoundly privilidged. May you never have to actually live in these conditions that you "missed out on."

Some of the kindest and most decent human beings I've known were sex workers, whose drug of choice was "crack cocaine," and none were ugly. Hate speech has its place and is protected by the first amendment. In this context it's just another way of saying "Hey, I'm on a spiritual trip so I've got it more together than those miserable degraded creatures…etc.." Just be careful, life can take some strange twists….